§ 8. Mr. ChisholmTo ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much tax the typical family paid (a) at the latest available date and (b) in 1992. [17625]
§ Mr. JackA family on male average earnings of about £330 a week in 1991–92 is estimated to have paid tax of about £110 a week. By 1996–97 average earnings are likely to have risen to around £400 a week, with tax rising to around £135 a week. But that family should still be about £700 a year better off than in 1991–92, after tax and inflation.
§ Mr. ChisholmWhy will the typical family next year pay 34.3 per cent. of its income in tax, when it would have paid only 32.2 per cent. in 1979, according to a parliamentary answer last week? Contrary to the reply of the Financial Secretary to the first question on the Order Paper, that difference has nothing to do with borrowing in the 1970s—which never reached the levels that we have seen in the last eight years—and everything to do with the Conservative party being the party of economic failure and unfair taxation, and of saying one thing on tax before an election and another thing after it.
§ Mr. JackThe hon. Member cannot wriggle off the hook. The average borrowings under the last Labour Government were 7 per cent., but are 2.5 per cent. under this Government. That equates to the equivalent of lop more on the standard basic rate of tax, had the Labour Government had honest taxation and honest borrowing.
It is no use the hon. Gentleman giving us lessons about the tax burden. His local authority in Edinburgh spent £200,000 on a temple of tyres display and £7,000—wait for this one—on an art exhibition displaying elephant dung, phallic symbols and men having sex in a pantomime horse—and that was the watered-down version.
§ Mr. Patrick ThompsonRegarding taxation, what matters to the average family in my constituency is the rising standard of living that they have had under the Conservative Government. Can my hon. Friend the Minister recall what the average family in my constituency recalls—the stagnation in the standard of living that occurred under the Labour Government in the 1970s? Can my hon. Friend confirm that we do not want that again?
§ Mr. JackI can certainly confirm that. It is interesting that Opposition Members always want to run away from the fact that, under Labour, real take-home pay grew by a miserly 1 per cent. That is something that everybody should remember. Under the Government, a family on average earnings is expected to be more than £4,500 better off than in 1978–79, an increase of some 40 per cent.